Friday, July 29, 2016

There’s a
lovely passage in an essay by Cynthia Ozick about the trick of personal
identity. She is writing about seeing herself as an old woman, and feeling a
certain “generational pang” about seeing young people rise up in the literary
world that she has long been part of.

“All the
same, whatever assertively supplanting waves may lap around me – signals of
redundancy, or of superannuation – I know I am held fast. Or, rather, it is not
so much a fixity of self as it is of certain exactnesses, neither lost nor forgotten;
a phrase, a scene, a voice, a momment. These exactnesses do not count as
memory, and even more surely escape the net of nostalgia or memoir. They are
platonic enclosures, or islands, independent of time, though not of place: in
short, they irrevocably are. Nothing can snuff them.”

This exactness
of the person is what so painfully escapes me, what so painfully is missing,
when I read about parenting. Amy Davidson, in this week’s New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/parenting-in-an-age-of-economic-anxiety
reviews what is surely the stupidest guide to parenting ever monstrously given
birth to by a publishing house: “The Game
Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How the Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help
You Deal with the Toughest Negotiators You Know—Your Kids”

The title is merely the diving board of bad:
from Davidson’s account, it gets badder and badder. Davidson’s review is a
roundup of parenting books, and all of them share the characteristic that there
is no exactness in them – either for the kids or the parents. The only desire
the parents have is, apparently, order and peace. This is the setup from the
getgo.

“Say
that you have two children, or maybe three, and that they fight for what’s
theirs. The contested objects are many: cake, Lego sets, the right to various
household electronics or to name the family dog. And the children aren’t
pleasant about it: they torment each other, and engage in guerrilla tactics
distinguishable from those of ruthless insurgents only by their disregard for
stealth, which might at least allow you, the parent, a little peace and quiet.
Each of them has a story about fairness and what he deserves.”

The
idea that contested objects are just there, and that adults are making no territorrial
claims through those objects, seems pretty laughable. But it is laughable on a
very political order: notice how the blank parents here are on one side, the
side of the self evident, and the children on the other side, the side of the
insurgents. Sound familiar? Yes, it is neo-colonialism coming to your living
room. In that political environment, the freakanomics guide to childrearing is
perfectly appropriate, since neo-liberalism is based on the premise that
exactness is an obstacle – individuality is entirely defined by consumer
choice. No voice, gesture or place that is immune from creative destruction and
substitution.

Davidson,
happily, is not endorsing the “game theorist” view of family management in her
article, but she does, less happily, picture a family setting as a sort of blankness
in which the libido plays no part. Parents are perfect little death drives, repetitious
little automaton who only want peace. The peace, apparently, of deathly order.
Children, as is weirdly common in articles about children, exist only as
monsters of disorder. They are either stuffed and cute, or monstrous and
quarreling. There is nothing to be thought about them – they do not give rise
to thought. Exactness here doesn’t have
a place or name.

We
are a long way from Spock and Dolto. I don’t like the journey, frankly, but I
do find it noteworthy, inasmuch as it so exactly reflects the political moment.

“What
the book shares with the current parenting moment is the sense that trust is a
commodity that’s in very short supply. Thomas, for example, is getting
reasonable grades “in his elementary school’s gifted-and-talented program,” but
is he really doing his best? Or is he “fibbing” about how hard he’s working,
“thinking about Minecraft” when he should be hunkered down with his book
project? Raeburn and Zollman suggest deploying the “principal-agent model” to
manage the case of “possible underperformers such as Thomas,” with the caveat
that, if the incentives are too great, he’d have good reason to cheat. Without
measures like “perfect monitoring” and “credible threats” (“Parents and
caregivers can use each other as Doomsday machines”), children will give in to
a tendency to lie. In the world of game theory, this is not so much a moral
problem as a practical one. Without constant child-control manipulations, the
middle-class home will fall apart, and there are no limits to the anxiety this
creates.”

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

To pay attention to pop culture takes energy – like anything
else. One can choose to pay attention to, say, Taylor Swift’s feud with Kim
Kardashian or not, but attention is not free, and the payoff is not guaranteed.
Perhaps, in the end, the feud won’t amuse you. Perhaps it will even leave a
sour feeling – you will feel like you didn’t want to go into it.

The pop culture rush, which is administered by thousands of
media sites, is supposed to overwhelm any prudence you might feel about your attention,
and even make it laughable that you haven’t “given” it to some phenomenon that
everybody knows about. Usually, the media sites can rely on shaming techniques
among the audience, who will pick some certain piece of information and make
the person who doesn’t know that piece of information feel embarrassed about
his ignorance. Shame and information are linked from our earliest days. I see
myself using shame, ocassionally, to make Adam know things. I find it weird,
when I step back, that I do this. But I do. Classrooms use this to the extent that a small,
attenuated ring of shame is put around the “great books”, or about this or that
piece of information in the sciences.

Myself, in the last few weeks I have run into mentions of
Pokemon Go whenever I look at a newspaper or magazine. Pokemon go jokes are all
over twitter. Yet, so far, I haven’t given my attention to it even to extent of
knowing what it is. Of course, saying
this is rather like reversing the poles, and making knowing about Pokemon Go
shameful; but I am not trying to head there – instead, the question is at what
point a critical mass in pop culture makes one feel that this is something I
have to know. Especially if you are a writer trying continually to get a fix on
the culture, this is the kind of question you do have to ponder. James Joyce
assumed that a free lance marketer in
Dublin in 1904 would know about the
semi-smutty stories of Paul de Kock, and
about the paper Tit-bits, and about many of the day’s popular songs. Ullyses is one of the few novels ever written
that tries to exhaust the question of what a character at a given date in a
given place would know. Since 1904, the intrusion of popular culture – of images,
songs, and games – into the sphere of private life has become exponentially
greater. Even Joyce refined his
references. Would a Leonard Bloom in 2016 know, or want to know, about Pokemon
Go?

So far, my answer is no. It isn’t as important, or at least it
doesn’t float in the semiosphere with such importance, that 2016 would not be
describable without it. But I don’t exactly know how I know this. One creates a
filter for pop culture information semi-consciously. As much as we live in a
hype world, we don’t have a firm idea of where these filters come from.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Last night we went to the opening of the London Calling show
at the Getty. I hated the title, since the Clash song – which the DJ played as
we ate fish and chips and drank our wine – is about rioting and the ice age (Thatcherism),
not the particular bourgeois fantasies enacted in the paintings in the show.
Not that I am criticizing those fantasies, far from it – but there was no punk
sensibility there.

The works by Frank Auerbach, Leon Kosoff, Lucien Freud, R.B.
Kitaj, and Michael Andrews – composed, according to the curator, Julian Brooks
(I think – I couldn’t hear the name of the gent who was supposed to lead the
invitees through the justification for the exhibition), a school of London that
showed that New York critics who, in the fifties, had proclaimed the death of
figuration were wrong. It was a pretty plain aesthetic argument, and I think a
false one. Abstraction not only submerged figuration, it produced the
conditions that would assure that its resurrection could only be as a damaged
style. Indeed, for all Brooks’s burbling about Lucien Freud’s work showing the
finest appreciation of the human figure since Rubins, what was evident was how under the influence
of the bomb and the scrawl these painters generally were. Figuration as damage,
as casualty: this was the response to abstraction I saw.

My favorite was the Auerbach room. These were truly physical
pictures, documents not only of choses vues but the aggregation of material, the
clogging, in the visual channel, the eye brought down from its angelic flight
into the nervy impulse that organizes it as a thing on a stalk. I’d like to
look at those pieces again. I suppose the most famous pieces are the canonical
ones in the Bacon room, although myself, I prefered the bicycle pic – a reminder
that Bacon was, after all, Irish. I thought of Flann O’brian’s The Third
Policeman, that eccentric paen to the bicycle.

What else? L.A., as always, looks terrific from the terrace –
the twilight coming in, the mist (or smog, or is it ash?) over the buildings.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.